Hi guys,

We are now trying out Anubis in front of https://old.lemmy.today/ to see if we can block many of the bots scraping lemmy content.

You will notice an image saying Anubis is checking if you are a bot, and then things should work normally after that.

There are many millions of ips trying to scrape lemmy content so blocking on ip level is difficult. Hopefully this improves the situation somewhat. :)

Thanks to @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com for sharing info about Anubis!

Edit: It was a lot better to just turn off public access of posts on old.lemmy.today, so we are actually not using Anunis anymore. Just log in to old.lemmy.today and things will work as normal.

Anubis seems to do a good job, most of the GitLab instances I've seen outside of gitlab.com use it and I've never had any problems with it even on lower end/mobile devices. Hopefully it cuts down on the bot issues, I love using old.lemmy.today.

never heard of anubis, wth is that

It sits between your web browser and old.lemmy.today and detects if you are a bot. If you are, your request doesn't pass through Anubis. It's Gandalf saying "you shall not pass".

So it will hopefully cut down on bots scraping the instance. Or it will piss them off even more. :)

Hope so!

You have very probably seen its logo on various websites that are using it, showing up before the content does:

Glad to see it working. Strange though, it seems not all comments here are federating to us. Only this chain federated

Oh ya now that I think about it I did

Oh, that's weird. They did federate to me, so it's not completely broken

Wonder what it means for Lemmy clients if this practice will be expanded to the main URL.

Will mobile apps support it? Or is only old.lemmy.today planned to be protected?

Pretty sure the API should be exempt, as well as user agents that don't impersonate browsers. So that should be fine, the only problem is that you need JavaScript to get through the challenge when using a browser (which is a bit unfortunate, as old.lemmy.today doesn't otherwise require JS).

It's not great but I guess it's required. Maybe just required for the initial check and then it can be turned off? Didn't try...

Yeah the API should be exempt. Will look into this a bit more in the coming days but wanted to see how well Anubis works on old.lemmy.today first for a while. We probably end up using it on lemmy.today as well. Just didnt want to make a big bang change everywhere on day 1. :)

Lemmy federation has been known to be buggy in certain releases before, and I really dont know what to do about it except try to keep up to date about bugs. I guess its a complex system underneath. From what ive read, its a queue of federation work that is supposed to take place, and stay in the queue until its successful. But I wish there was a good way to see the status of it.

I have been looking in db tables and log files before to figure out the current status and it works, but its not so convenient.

Yeah, the Javascript requirement can be a pain point, even if it affects a small minority of users. Thanks for clarificaton!

All good then! :)

Ive seen this before too but never thought about what it was. :)

Tried it, yes it works this way.

Yes this is what's weird. There shouldn't be a reason why some actions didn't federate.

Thanks for your hard work!

Oh, that's what that means! Thank you!